tion come: At that very instant, Christianity will once again come into
existence.” Kierkegaard’s antihistoricism was also bound up with a theolog-
ical radicalism that at some points caused his requirements to fluctuate be-
tween being totally impossible to fulfill, on the one hand, and being invol-
untarily comical, on the other: “To become a Christian in the New
Testament sense is such a radical transformation that, from a purely human
perspective, one would have to say that it is the greatest tragedy for a family
if one of its members becomes a Christian.”
As early as the second issue ofThe Moment, Kierkegaard posed the ques-
tion: “If we are really Christians—then what is God?” And Kierkegaard
himself provided the answer: “The most ludicrous being that has ever
lived.” With this question and answer Kierkegaard was not only pointing
backward to the one single thesis he had proposed inFædrelandeton March
28; when he asserted that Christianity did not exist, he was also pointing
forward in time, to Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God. Of
course, this was not an ontological statement, but a social-psychological
assertion that linked the existence of God to the significance—or lack of
significance—that Christianity has for society’s values and for individual
self-understanding. Thus if Christianity does not exist, then God is dead.
But this doesnotmean that human beings have been freed from some out-
moded form of servitude. On the contrary, it means the death of the human
being, the death of the person of spirit, whereuponHomo sapiensis reborn
as an animal: “Being a Christian in the New Testament sense is just as
different, in the upward direction, from being human, as being an animal
is different from being human in the downward direction.”
Grundtvig’s Rejoinder
Kierkegaard’s attack added to the confusion among the clergy, who were
already confused and who generally tended to be as irate at the attack as
anticlerical people were delighted by it. Martensen continued to follow the
course of events closely and had long feared that Kierkegaard might make
common cause with Grundtvig and his allies. In the first article inFædrelan-
det, Kierkegaard—as a way of demonstrating how many years earlier he had
made the decision to launch his attack—had noted that “old Grundtvig”
had witnessed his statement that he would attack, but that “Bishop Mynster
must first live out his life [and] be buried with all pomp and music.” Perhaps
this remark was a sign of a rather close relationship to Grundtvig, maybe
even a conspiracy—Grundtvig, after all, had also been demonstrative in his
absence from Mynster’s funeral!—and Martensen was fully convinced that